Still living at home at 40? Shame on you

As I navigate the thrashing seas of adulthood, my teenage self looms up at times like wreckage from some long-sunk ship. Three main things I remember from my late teens: I was an idiot; I didn't realise I was an idiot; and, just like those foxes that get caught in a snare, I'd have chewed my own leg off if that was what it took to be free.

The thought of staying at home wasn't even rejected; it just didn't occur to me. This I've always felt to be the natural order of things - some time in your late teens, an exit sign starts flashing before your eyes and that's it. The children go, the parents have to let go, there's a bit of sadness about empty nest syndrome, but it's a done deal. How wrong can a person be?

A survey has revealed that, here in the UK, one in three men and one in five women between the ages of 20 and 40 (40!) still lives with their parents. While living costs and the recession are cited as factors, so, it seems, is having their meals cooked, getting their laundry done and being made a packed lunch, though many said they would leave if their parents started to irritate them.

Stop right there. Considering this survey includes people nudging 40, how can it be possible that their parents have never irritated them? Why aren't the parents irritated or, more to the point, worried sick? When the survey goes on to reveal that 30% would leave home only when they got married, the impulse is to scream: what is this, the "olden days"? Maybe for some it is.

Could it be that we are entering the era of the Intergenerational Crush, where children never properly leave home, generations merge as one and we look back on empty nest syndrome as little more than a short-lived fad in British parenting? Certainly for a survey conducted by a pasta company - Giovanni Rana - these are strangely Italian findings, which may have many of you nodding in approval.

Considering the times we live in, if this survey heralds a return to the extended family, isn't this a good thing? Well yes, extended families are a good thing, but the clue lies in the word "extended", as in stretched, pulled out, expanded, different generations staying close, involved with, and supportive of, each other. A continuum, a tribe.

However, this is a far cry from this survey, where nothing seems "extended", not if people in their late 30s are still rotting in their childhood bedrooms with their Bagpuss pyjama cases. Why? For free meals, laundry and packed lunches. So, getting their pants washed and a cheese and pickle sarnie - this is their price? How devoid of basic oomph can a person be? Presumably, when they get a partner, these 20-40s will expect the same pampering, probably not receive it and be straight back home again. Brilliant. Not weird or worrying at all.

Except it is. Indeed, this survey seems to say very little about the extended family. Rather, it seems to usher in a new, much less healthy, concept - the suspended family. By which I mean a family unit that has failed to evolve, the old refusing to give up their young, the young refusing to give up their childhood, the two meeting in the middle in some kind of slow motion implosion of family dysfunction,

No economic climate excuses such limbo. If people hurtling towards their 40s are embracing a situation once parodied by Ronnie Corbett in Sorry, then an urgent wake-up call is needed. While it is too easy to "blame the parents", I say: "Blame the children too." While it's sad if an empty nest scares the old, it's a tragedy if autonomy scares the young.

What they should keep in mind is "extended family, good; suspended family, bad". In basic terms, stop being so spoiled and pathetic: sort out your own laundry and bills, even - wow - make your own packed lunches. After all, Tupperware stops food getting stale, but human beings won't stay fresh forever.

Older women want exposure, but not of the 'get 'em off' variety

The new cast members of the West End show Calendar Girls, including June Brown, Jerry Hall and Anita Dobson, are said to be "terrified" of taking their clothes off to re-enact the WI charity calendar scenes. Well, don't do it then.

There is no reason why anyone has to be naked in Calendar Girls. There are ways to work around it and the audience is hardly going to be ripping up seats because they're not getting to see Dot Cotton's "money-maker". The guff about standing the actresses strategically behind vases or pianos makes it all sound yet more feeble and depressing.

The talk about older women becoming invisible on TV does not mean they desire such increased exposure onstage. Most of us have about 10 minutes in our 20s when we would consider ourselves "match fit" for such an endeavour. But 40s, 50s, 60s? Or, in Brown's case, her 80s. Who are these repellent people demanding that an octogenarian, a well-loved actress, get 'em off? Why don't they go down to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and get 'em off themselves?

The Calendar Girls franchise is fast taking over from The Graduate as the stage production older actresses must dread. Great parts, but with a caveat of having to get your kit off for the titillation of coach parties from Whitby. Lest we forget, Anne Bancroft refused to do Mrs Robinson's nude scenes and that was on a closed set. The stage Mrs Robinsons, who have included Hall, had no such luck. Now here is the latest wave of West End Calendar Girls being coerced into flashing at the stalls night after night.

Calendar Girls is supposed to be about female camaraderie and chutzpah, not thespian humiliation. It would be different if it was joyously done, but I feel the actresses are given no choice and their powerlessness is telling. One doesn't have to see French women ditching their monokinis to realise the wisdom of covering up. The moment you make a reluctant woman disrobe, she loses more than her clothes.

That's why, in Hollywood, the more bankable an actress, the less she has to take her clothes off. The rest is just misogynistic power play, and to hide it they really would need, to paraphrase the Calendar Girls themselves, "considerably larger buns".

Please, please bring on the end of the Croc and make it snappy

It would appear that Crocs, the brightly coloured, moulded-resin footwear that elegant design forgot, have experienced a sharp decline in sales. I'm only surprised it took so long.

For one thing, you never seem to have to replace a pair of Crocs. Children at least have the option of growing out of the horrors. Otherwise, they are so indestructible it would not be implausible to imagine them surviving some nuclear Armageddon, Mel Gibson's lime-green Crocs bobbing for all eternity upon radioactive oceans.

There is also the matter of the Crocs' USP - their undeniable hideousness. However comfortable they are, they make everyone look as though they have baby milk crates attached to their feet. I resisted at first, but then invested in a black pair. I like to kid myself they blend in, but really they're just goth-Crocs or Crocs-in-denial-that-they-are-Crocs.

The same goes for men. Male Croc wearers over 10 are just the 21st-century take on socks with Jesus sandals. For both sexes, donning the Crocs is a statement like no other: whatever else may be happening in your day, you do not expect (or frankly deserve) to be desired. This is why, comfortable though they are, few will mourn the passing of the Crocs. Only shoemakers should be panicking: with no Crocs, the ugliest shoe award is up for grabs.

Laugh along chaps, or we might think you are being snobbish

More fuss about the Bullingdon photo of Cameron and chums looking all yummy and Brideshead, with the Tories complaining that a TV drama on it would harm their election chances. Truth is, nothing could stop people laughing at this photograph - it's manna from class-divide heaven. But it's only terminal if the Tories are terminally humourless about it. Stop sulking, chaps - laugh along or die.